- Today marks the anniversary of the first tweet by Hal Finney about Bitcoin in 2009.
- Hal Finney was an early Bitcoin contributor besides Satoshi Nakamoto.
- Finney is remembered as one of the most important figures in the history of Bitcoin.
Today fourteen years ago, i.e., on 10th January 2009, Hal Finney tweeted the first Bitcoin. It was a simple tweet that said, “Running bitcoin.” It has garnered 61,800 likes and has been retweeted 19,800 times to date.
Crypto enthusiasts took to Twitter to remember him by paying their respects. A Twitter handle by the name Satoshi club wrote, “His contributions to the crypto community will never be forgotten. RIP Hal, you will always be remembered as a pioneer”.
Harold Thomas Finney, more popularly known as Hal Finney, was a computer programmer and early contributor to the early Bitcoin project. He was one of the first to run a Bitcoin software client and mine Bitcoins in the early days of the network.
Finney was also a well-known figure in the cryptography and digital privacy communities and was involved in developing various other digital currencies and encryption technologies.
Being a cypherpunk, he once said, “It seemed so obvious to me: Here we are faced with the problems of loss of privacy, creeping computerization, massive databases, more centralization – and [David] Chaum offers a completely different direction to go in, one which puts power into the hands of individuals rather than governments and corporations. The computer can be used as a tool to liberate and protect people, rather than to control them.”
Additionally, Finney is known for his role in developing the “reusable proof of work” (RPOW) concept. It is an alternative to the traditional proof of work (POW) algorithms, where RPOW allows the same computational work to be used multiple times while traditional POW is only used once. Unfortunately, on August 28, 2014, Finney passed away in Phoenix, Arizona, due to ALS complications.
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